


The Storm

by LananiA3O



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Batdad, Batfam Content War, Gen, Smoking, batfam, blatant headcanons, dubious continuity, lots of bad weather, practically no swearing for a change
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-12
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-12-26 03:01:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12049911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LananiA3O/pseuds/LananiA3O
Summary: A bad thunder storm has hit Gotham and Bruce returns from patrol to find his children huddled up in the den of the manor together, each of them dealing with their own demons in their own ways. One thing they all have in common: they hate thunder storms.





	The Storm

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jerseydevious](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/gifts).



> Written for the very spontaneous mini-event "Batfam Content Wars". Believe it or not, this is my HAPPY entry.  
> Please keep in mind that I don't normally read the comics, so I only know the bare minimum about Damian, Steph and Duke, and this thing is set in a dubious, murky continuity some time after Tim's bus has come back.
> 
> Inspired by this panel: [Jason and thunder](http://lananiscorner.tumblr.com/post/165168428373/batmaneveryway-jason-was-a-genius-boy-wonder)
> 
> Gifted to jerseydevious. Here, have some onions!
> 
> For status updates, writing trivia, fandom/fanfiction/writing related questions and occasional random ramblings, please visit my [tumblr](http://lananiscorner.tumblr.com/).

None of his children liked thunder storms. If he was being honest, Bruce was not surprised that none of them were in their beds.

Jason was the first one he almost quite literally stumbled across. It was dark and he had already switched from the suit to civvies, so he almost missed his second son on the way into the den, half coated in shadow as he was, seated on the floor just inside the main entrance to the room, with his back to the wall, his arms crossed in front of his chest and one leg stretched out to trip anyone trying to enter the room without his permission. That’s what nearly got Bruce, but he managed to step rather than stumble just in the very last second.

Outside, in the pelting rain and the howling winds, the sky cracked loudly, and Jason twitched. It was a far cry from the very first time Bruce had witnessed him asleep during a storm. Jason had been a boy, only a child, asleep after a long day of school and patrol. Bruce had merely come into his room to check on him, to make sure he hadn’t stayed up late to finish another extra credit assignment _again_. As the skies had broken just above the roof of the manor, Jason had shot up from his sleep and the look on his face had been one of pure horror and panic. He had vaulted off the bed almost immediately, ducking low and hiding behind the frame, until the next stroke of lightning had hit.

Bruce would never forget the almost ridiculously palpable relief in Jason’s voice as he had walked up to the window, pressed his hands against the glass, and muttered “A thunderstorm. That explains it.”

“What did you think it was?” Bruce had asked back then, and Jason had turned around muttering it’s-nothings and neverminds until he had finally realized that Bruce was not going to back down. Eventually, Jason had hung his head in defeat, whispering only one word.

“Gunshots.”

Suddenly, everything had made sense, and Bruce had felt a strange relief even though his heart had been stuck in a vice. Of course Jason would associate loud bangs with gunshots. He had grown up in Park Row, in the worst part of town. The sounds of the heavens barely reached people down there, but gunshots? Gunshots were as common in Park Row as rats under floorboards and cockroaches under the sink. Bruce shuddered to think how many times Jason had woken up, terrified for his life, taking cover behind the nearest piece of furniture until the angry shouting and the pained sobs and the sirens had stopped.

Back then, he had crossed the room and pulled Jason into a hug, holding him tightly while muttering reassurances. _There are no guns in the manor. No one can hurt you here. I will protect you_. A fine job he had done at that, Bruce thought sourly, as he looked at the young man who was now guarding the entrance to the den in his sleep. Jason was no longer a little boy. He had grown up to be a strong, young man, but he had missed half his childhood along the way. Even in his sleep he was still frowning, all hard lines and apprehension. Gunshots no longer terrified Jason, but Bruce would be a fool to believe that Jason ever felt safe. He doubted he ever would again.

Worst of all, he could not fix it.

Back then, a hug and a few reassurances was all it had taken. Now, if he tried, Bruce was sure he would get punched in the face before having Jason storm off in a flurry of heated emotions. It was still rare for him to willingly spend time at the manor and the relationship between him and his second son was still shaky at best. It was not a boat that was worth rocking and so Bruce forced himself to be content with brushing back the few stray bangs that had fallen over Jason’s forehead instead. One day they would hopefully get along just fine again. It was Bruce’s greatest hope.

The second one he saw was Dick, sprawled out in a ridiculous pose in front of the fireplace, obscured almost completely by a mass of blankets, a teenage boy, a dog and a cat. Damian clung to him like a limpet, although Bruce was sure he would deny that fact later.

For Dick, it wasn’t the clasping kind of thunder that triggered bad memories. It was the slow rolling of the heavens, the sound of oncoming destruction that preceded the rain and sometimes even the light. Dick hadn’t been nearly as coy as Jason when Bruce had first confronted him about it.

“There was a big drum roll before my mom and dad went for their last routine,” Dick had explained to him back then, almost casually. “We both know how that ended.”

Dick no longer liked drum rolls. They had been this magical, anticipation-building thing to him once, judging from the care-free grin he had given at the beginning of that faithful night, when he had been called forth for one of his own routines. By the end of the night, drum rolls had become heralds of death, not that anyone would ever have known. Dick was just as good at hiding his emotions as any of them could be, if they tried, but in contrast to Jason, who was more than happy to let the world know just what exactly he was thinking about any given situation, Dick was prone to bottling up his emotions, compartmentalizing and obscuring and pretending that everything was sunshine and daisies when it really was not.

Worst of all, he had learned it from Bruce.

It was a useful skill, Bruce had to admit. In the field. At work. It was a useful skill. But Dick had been so quick and eager to emulate him, to be the best that Bruce could want, that he had also carried it over into his private life and Bruce wanted to kick himself for that. He wanted to grab Dick by the shoulders and shake him, to tell him that he didn’t need to do that, that it was ok to show weakness. He never did, though, because the first thing Dick would definitely do in response would be to throw those words right back at him, and Bruce, if he was being honest with himself, wasn’t ready for that lesson. He wasn’t sure if he would ever be.

Damian was a different story entirely. Damian had been raised to ignore gunshots and he had been raised to ignore distractions. He had been trained from infancy to be lethally precise in any situation, and to leave his own, personal qualms out of any given task, and Bruce might never have realized that something was wrong had Dick not pointed out to him that every time he had taken Damian on patrol on a rainy, thunderstorm night, Damian would become even quieter, even less approachable than usual.

Dick’s attempts to talk to Damian about the subject, to slowly weasel the information out of him, had been futile. It was a mystery he had not been able to solve and his anger when Bruce had given him the answer after little less than a minute was hard to forget.

The answer was Master Kirigi. Bruce remembered his training with him all to well, and part of that training had been sitting outside in the hammering rain, the howling winds, and the harrowing thunder for hours at a time, meditating and practicing absolute control and stillness in spite of the chaos all around. Those that panicked, those that jumped, those that even so much as _flinched_ had been quickly kicked off the side of the mountain. If they survived their falls, good. If not, also good. Master Kirigi did not care one way or the other, so long as you eventually managed to achieve perfect numbness to the elements around you.

Damian had been numb when he had come into the family. In some ways, he still was, but it filled Bruce’s heart with hope to see him curled up in the arms of his oldest brother, to watch him _flinch_ at the sound of thunder. He didn’t need to be perfect anymore, and while he had initially perceived that as an insult, as a backhanded insinuation that he wasn’t perfect after all, he had slowly come to accept it for what it was: genuine appreciation.

Bruce was proud of his youngest son.

On the other side of the coffee table, the girls had claimed the big couch for themselves. Barbara was lying in the middle, her arms curled protectively around her eventual successors as Batgirl. Barbara also associated the loud clap of thunder with a gunshot, but in contrast to Jason, it was not any gunshot.

Only _the_ gunshot.

In contrast to the boys, it didn’t bother her on an emotional level, or at least so Barbara had explained to him once. The problem were the nerves in her back, the ones just around that dreadful injury, right on the edge of where her body went from ‘perfectly aware and in control’ to ‘I cannot feel a damn thing’. They itched and ached during thunderstorms and Bruce was quite confident that the distracting, annoying sensation was a mixture of genuine nerve damage and psychosomatic overreaction. If she had been awake, Barbara would have been pinching and scratching the affected spot.

It was moments like these when Bruce realized how much Dick and Barbara had in common, at least in terms of family dynamics. He was the big brother. She was the big sister. Both of them benefited immensely from having their little siblings around. It was a shame that Barbara came to the manor so rarely these days and Bruce made a mental note to invite the children who had already flown the coop more often. Alfred’s birthday, Christmas and Thanksgiving was not nearly often enough and though he doubted he could manage to get all of them to come for less grand celebrations (Jason was bound to flip him the bird at least half the time), he would make an effort to try.

Another loud clap of thunder sounded over the roof and Stephanie burrowed deeper into the sheets she was bundled up in, and closer to Barbara and her perfectly still form. Stephanie was not still. Her eyeballs were racing underneath the closed lids and even though the room was at a cozy eighty degrees and she was smothered in warm blankets, Stephanie trembled like a leaf in the wind.

Stephanie was possibly the hardest to relate to and talk to, Bruce had to admit to himself. Part of that was a simple difference in tempers: Stephanie was outgoing and cheerful, whereas Bruce was reserved and stoic. They started out on opposite sides of the spectrum and that in and of itself made it harder to relate to her. Stephanie was also a teenage girl and since Bruce had never been either, there was another mark off the ‘can relate’ checklist right there.

However, the most obstructive fact was undoubtedly the trauma she had gone through at the hands of Black Mask.

Stephanie hardly ever talked about it, except maybe to rant at him for all the ways in which he had failed her. Bruce was not surprised to see her get along splendidly with Jason. The physical injuries and scars she had carried from those horrible hours had told him bits and pieces of the story, but it was an incomplete tale and sometimes Bruce felt like the most important parts were missing.

Stephanie had always hated rain and loved thunder and lighting. After Black Mask, it had been the other way around and to this day Bruce had not the slightest idea why. He had more or less confirmed guesses – dehydration had been on the long, long list of mistreatments Leslie had been able to identify upon treating her – but that was not good enough. Sensory overload during sleep depravation was another possibility. Locking prisoners up in resonating chambers and then producing loud noises every time they were just about to fall asleep was a very common long-term torture tactic that had been employed by countless dictatorships throughout the world.

Whatever Black Mask had done, it had been effective, and Bruce sighed as he drew the blankets more closely around her shoulders. Stephanie deserved much more than he had given her.

On Barbara’s left side, Cassandra twitched quietly in her sleep. In many ways, Cass had been the easiest child to handle, save for her aphasia, which was bound to put a damper on any and all attempts at communication. She, too, had been fearless once upon a time. Her discomfort during thunderstorms came not so much from the sounds they produced, but from the flashes of lighting. It had been hard for her to explain at first. Perhaps it had been even harder for her to realize that something was wrong, because Cassandra’s discomfort manifested itself not so much in obvious, physical signs as in a tendency to act more erratically and blank out during fights. The first time it had happened, she had nearly taken a crowbar to the face.

Bruce had tried to talk to her and Cassandra, to her credit, had tried to talk in return, but she had not been able to find the right words to express what was wrong. Barbara had eventually handed her a sketching pad, and asked her to draw, but after ten minutes of staring at the paper and scribbling lines that had not made sense to anyone, Cass had pushed the paper back to Barbara and said “not good”.

More important things, more urgent things, had popped up then and for a while everyone had forgotten about her flashes of irrational behavior. Then, one day, during a thunderstorm at dinner time – one of the rare dinners for which the entire family had been in the house – Cass had gotten up and retreated to her room. She had come back out again a minute later, dressed in the simple, white leotard she wore for her dancing practice. She had made a detour to one of the storage rooms on her way to the gym and had come out with two big cans of paint – one white, one bright green. Once in the gym, in the room that Bruce had reserved for her dancing, Cassandra had turned up the music – Vanessa Mae’s ‘Devil’ Thrill’ – and dunked both her hands and feet into each of the cans.

And then, Cassandra had danced.

The color had been all over her and all over the room as well, erratic splashes of white and green that marked everything and everyone within her vicinity. Bruce remembered standing there together with the rest of the family, splatters of green and white paint all over him, watching her movements grow ever more frantic and disjointed. To his right, Jason had bristled, before stalking out of the room in quick, determined strides. Bruce had caught up with him in the gardens outside the manor and the fact that Jason was smoking, told him it was serious. Jason never smoked anymore, except to relieve immediate onsets of anxiety.

“It’s the pit.” Jason had muttered as another couple of flashes of lightning erupted around them. “It reminds her of the Lazarus Pit.”

Green and white. Uncomfortably bright flashes. Disorientation and madness. It made sense. Jason had escaped from the manor before Bruce had found the words to thank him, but at the very least he now knew what was wrong with Cassandra.

It made sense now, that she was curled up on Barbara’s left side, this very night, sandwiched in between the backrest of the couch and her two sisters, sheltered from the lighting. Bruce got up from where he knelt in front of the couch, walked over to the massive front of windows overlooking the gardens and drew the curtains shut a little more closely. The less lightning, the less madness, the better.

He had been closing the last curtain when he had spotted Tim, huddled in the hammock in the Green Corner of the room, so called for its abundance of exotic plants. They needed a lot of light and as a consequence the curtains were never drawn here. He had almost finished closing the last one when a low murmur came from his right.

“Bruce?”

“Yes, Tim. It’s me.”

He tried not to let the desperate hope in Tim’s voice get to him, nor the almost tangible relief when Bruce actually answered. Tim almost seemed to melt into the hammock and the smile that hushed over his lips was equal parts sadness and joy.

“This is the manor, right? I’m not dreaming?”

“No, Tim.” Bruce readjusted the blankets and ran his hand through Tim’s hair. “You’re not dreaming.”

“Good.”

Tim was out like a light before he had time to reply, and Bruce couldn’t blame him. He had only recently returned to them from that horrible pocket dimension he had been sent to, from what the rest of the family had believed to be death. Tim had quite a few things in common with Jason now. Things had changed quite a bit since his disappearance, and so had Tim. Like Jason, he was a young man, but he didn’t look or behave his age. Jason looked older and acted younger. Tim looked younger and acted older. The young man that now lay in that hammock had the frail body of a young teen and the wariness of a shell-shocked veteran and Bruce hated himself for not having been able to protect him, to save him.

Still, some things remained unchanged and that included Tim’s dislike of being alone in the dark. For as long as Bruce could remember, every time thunder and rain had hit the manor, blocking out even the last bits of moonlight and the last few stars, Tim had crawled out of bed and come here, to the den, to the green corner, to find the brightest spot in the house. It had taken Bruce a visit to Drake manor to truly understand where that behavior came from.

Dark, bleake, empty. Those were the only words anyone could use to describe the Drake residence in the absence of its inhabitants, and Tim’s parents had been absent a lot. A gala here, a field trip there, an expedition in this country, a dig in that country. Tim had been left alone for substantial amounts of time during his childhood, a fact that Bruce had gleaned from a number of casual, bitter remarks from Tim, and in his case there had been no Alfred to look after him.

Tim’s ability to look like he was going to be perfectly fine no matter how the situation changed, his seeming competence far beyond his years, had been his downfall. Yes, Tim could be extremely competent, even as a child. Yes, he could take care of himself for weeks without any supervision or even any human contact at all, but that didn’t mean that he should.

Bruce had been just about ready to grab a blanket for himself from the nearby closet and settle down in on the wicker deck chair next to Tim when he remembered that someone was missing.

He found Duke in the kitchen, sitting under the bright light of the lamp above the kitchen table with his iPhone in front of him and a spoon and a box of Ben & Jerry’s in his hands. He gave Bruce a quick hand wave and a nod as he entered.

“Hey, Bruce. Can’t sleep?”

“Apparently, I am not the only one,” Bruce answered dryly as he grabbed a glass from the cupboard next to the fridge and filled it with water straight from the tap. Duke watched him closely as he returned to the table and set down next to the latest addition to his ever-growing family.

“Yeah, quite the congregation in the living room, isn’t it?” Duke smirked before digging into the ice cream once more. The box was almost half empty. “Only good thing about storms – they bring people closer together.”

“So...” Bruce tried not to think too hard about the many ways this conversation could go south as he stared at his half-empty glass. “What brought you down here, Duke? The thunder? The lightning? The wind?”

For a moment, Duke looked at him as if he had just made the worst joke in the world, as if he wasn’t quite sure whether he was being trolled or not. Then he put down the ice cream and gave a hard glare at the drops battering against the kitchen window.

“The rain.”

“The rain?” Bruce raised an eyebrow. “It’s Gotham. It’s always raining here.”

“Well, I haven’t always lived _here_!” Duke lobbed back at him, before running his palms over his face. “Have you ever been hit by a hurricane?”

Bruce pondered the question for a moment. He had travelled far and wide, yet most of his time had been spent in Gotham, too far north for tropical storms. He had been through a thousand blizzards, but somehow he doubted Duke would let that count.

“No.”

“Lucky you.” His eyes were still focused on the window, but his mind was a thousand miles away. Bruce could tell. “I was born in the Caribbean, you know? I mean, we moved to Gotham when I was still very young, but I remember a few bits and pieces. When I was... five... there was this big hurricane that hit our coast. Tore down half the buildings like they were made of paper. Streets all flooded. No power, no clean water. Hardly any food.” He rocked back in his chair and sighed.

“The first day wasn’t so bad, at least not for my family. Sure the house was flooded, but we had managed to pack some food, water and batteries to take with us. They set up evacuation points outside of the city. Most of my friends were already there when we arrived. Some never made it. Three days in, first people started getting sick. Rumors of cholera started spreading. Food stores started running low... Have you ever seen what happens, when you put thousands of desperate people into a cramped space with little to no security and dwindling food stocks?”

“I have.” Bruce felt a shiver run down his spine. “A couple of years ago Gotham got hit by bad earthquake. Washington DC declared the city to be No Man’s Land and blew up the bridges. It was bad.”

That was an understatement. Bruce remembered No Man’s Land all too well, and he hoped the city would never see its like again. Duke nodded.

“Now picture that. Except that it keeps on raining and raining and raining...”

At last, Bruce took a look at Duke’s phone. It was the GCN weather forecast, showing a real-time map of the thunderstorm rolling over the city. Bruce tipped his glass in the phone’s direction.

“GCN is right, Duke. This storm will be over in an hour, maybe two. You are safe here. You should get some sleep.”

Duke laughed at that. “What? Want me to grab a blanket and curl up with Dick and Damian in front of the fireplace?”

“I would suggest the deck chair in the Green Corner,” Bruce said. “It’s a lot more comfortable than it looks. And Tim would appreciate the company, even if he won’t admit it.”

“Yeah...” Duke took a deep sigh, finished his ice cream and dumped the empty bowl into the recycling bin. Bruce watched out of the corner of his eye as he closed the weather report and locked his phone. “Good night, Bruce. See ya tomorrow.”

“Good night, Duke.”

He waited a total of ten minutes after Duke had left, watching the rain and the thunder and the lightning and the wind as they kept on tormenting the trees outside of the manor. With a deep sigh, Bruce finished his glass, set it down in the sink, and returned to the den once more. Everyone was sound asleep, or at the very least seemed like it. Bruce settled down in the arm chair to the left of the coffee table and let his gaze slide over the room once, marking everyone’s positions.

The storm could rage outside all it wanted, but it would not disturb his family. Not tonight.


End file.
